To publish a proceedings online on an Open Access basis, the conference organizer(s) pay(s) a publication fee to the publisher which is due on acceptance of the final versions of all the proceedings articles prior to publication. As such, the costs for the proceedings publication are fully covered by the conference organizer(s) and no additional publication fees are charged to authors by the publisher.

The copyright of all articles which are published in this proceedings series remains with the Authors, i.e. Authors retain full ownership of their published work. Upon acceptance of a proceedings proposal, the conference organizer(s) sign(s) a publishing agreement in which they grant Athena International Publishing an exclusive publication license for the proceedings. Under this license, the following rights are granted to the publisher:

• The exclusive right to publish and distribute the proceedings and the articles contained therein, and to grant this right to others, including for commercial purposes.
• The right to publish and circulate the proceedings articles on an Open Access basis under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.
• The right to make the proceedings articles available in all forms and media so that they can be used with the latest technology even after publication.
• The authority to enforce the rights in the proceedings articles, on behalf of the Authors, against third parties, for example, in the case of plagiarism or copyright infringement.

For more information on post-acceptance rights, please refer to the section on Copyright in our Copyright & User Licenses policy.

All articles published in Athena Transactions in Biology and Life Sciences are Open Access, meaning that they are immediately and permanently accessible for free on the Athena International Publishing platform. A Creative Commons (CC) user license subsequently defines how end users can reuse those articles after publication.

Articles in Athena Transactions in Biology and Life Sciences are published under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, meaning that end users can freely share an article (i.e. copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt it (i.e. remix, transform and build upon the material), on the condition that proper attribution is given (i.e. appropriate credit, a link to the license and an indication if any changes were made; all in such a way that does not suggest that the licensor endorses the user or the use) and the material is only used for non-commercial purposes.

Note that conference organizers must accept this CC license on behalf of Authors when signing the publishing agreement for their proceedings. However, in exceptional cases other user licenses can be applied to individual articles within a proceedings to comply with government regulations or funding mandates. Deviations from the standard user license need to be requested by the conference organizer(s) immediately on acceptance of an article. Note that once applied to a published article a Creative Commons user license is non-revocable and cannot be changed anymore.

For more information on the terms associated with applicable user licenses, please refer to the section on End-User Licenses in our Copyright & User Licenses policy.